HP to turn home printing into a web service

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ZDNet UK recently had a chat to HP’s chief technology officer Antonio Rodriguez during which he unveiled plans to radically change the way we think about printing on our home printers.{ad}

Rather than the standard buy printer – install drivers on machine – use. HP are driving towards a model where you plug the printer into a home network, but then don’t ever print to it directly. Instead you send what you want to print to a HP server and HP initiates the print job on your printer.

It may sound quite bizarre on first reading, but HP have not gone crazy. By embracing this new method of cloud printing they aim to open up printing for the user by making it available on any device you use anywhere in the world without any installations required.

What this means in real terms is you’ll be able to take a photo with your iPhone and have it printed out ready for when you get home. Rather than having to keep an installation disc around for your printer when you buy that new laptop you’ll instead just be able to login to your HP printing service and print what you like and regardless of where you are.

HP are also aiming to leverage this printing service in conjunction with other services too. For example, social networks will be able to implement new features specifically targeted at being printed out. HP also want to ensure printing remains relevant as we store and create more content digitally. All-in-one devices will also form part of this new cloud service and allow documents scanned in using them to be uploaded to a user’s service making them available for printing or download later.

HP have the working name for this service set as CloudPrint, but that is by no means final. We can expect to see a working version of CloudPrint either at the end of this year or early next.

Matthew’s Opinion
Removing the need for software and drivers for a printer will be welcomed by most people. Printer drivers are renowned for being way too large and taking an age to install. Being able to print from any device with just a login is also a nice idea.

The biggest concern is obviously going to be privacy. Everything you print will be sent to a HP server before reaching your printer. Rodriguez made it clear that the data will be encrypted so they will never see it, but information will be recorded about your printer such as ink levels. So you can expect to get reminder e-mails about buying new cartridges I suspect.

You also have to wonder how much HP is betting on tying this in to other services. There is clearly an opportunity to do a deal with photo printing services here. So instead of printing at home you pay for your digital photos to be printed and shipped to you.

The nicest part of this CloudPrint service is definitely the ability to print from any device, and just as important, the ability to scan a document and have it stored in digital form accessible from anywhere. HP could easily tie this service in to a cloud storage service too paving the way for even more additional features and services for your data.